Last week’s high profile announcement of Chris Roberts’ return to gaming and his highly anticipated PC space sim game, Star Citizen™, caused such a rush of support, the servers at www.robertsspaceindustries.com (the Star Citizen site) that hosted the game’s independently maintained crowd funding program simply collapsed leaving thousands of would-be pledgers and supporters on the outside looking in for days.

Today, the legendary game designer announced a solution to that problem. Roberts and his newly formed company, Cloud Imperium™, launched a Kickstarter campaign, http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/cig/star-citizen, which will provide a stable and scalable crowd funding platform in addition to the custom one hosted on the Star Citizen site to help Roberts reach the company’s stated goal of raising a minimum of two million dollars for Star Citizen.

Despite the problems, which included multiple days without any pledge service on the Roberts Space Industries site, the company still managed to raise one million dollars in one week. “It’s a testament to the will power of our amazing fans,” said Roberts. “At a time when most would have given up, some dedicated fans kept trying to log on and eventually were able to get through and make a pledge. We appreciate all those efforts and now with Kickstarter, we believe we have an answer for everyone.

“It is all about giving our fans the opportunity to choose the platform and payment provider they feel the most comfortable with. We asked whether they wanted Kickstarter as an option and they spoke! Between Kickstarter and the original site, which supports Paypal and major credit cards, I believe we have the tools in place to make everyone feel comfortable in backing this game. I would also like to take a moment to thank the great people at Kickstarter. They were quick to offer help and have been great as we put together a solution.

“Those who pledged via Roberts Space Industries through our very rough first week of operation and those who make a pledge going forward on Kickstarter or on our site will all have their pledges tied directly to their Roberts Space Industries account,” said Roberts. “Nothing has changed there. We just hope that people will understand the situation we were in and support us and support what we plan on bringing to the table for PC gamers everywhere.”

InBlack wrote on Oct 19, 2012, 03:45:Hello my name is Failed Hasbeen who made a few really cool games in the rose-tinted-ancient-past of the 90's.

If anyone can make a space sim work in 201X, it's Chris Roberts. If he can't do it then the genre is probably dead for good, as the pool of people with any kind of experience developing the genre is only going to shrink.

Thats pure conjecture how can the genre shrink from nonexistance? Its not like Chris Roberts was or is the ultimate space sim developer and the games were hardly original. Sure the first few Wind Commander games were quite good, but they werent even close to the greatness of Xwing or Tie Fighter. In my opinion Freespace1 & 2 were better games as well, all they lacked was FMVs. Hell, even the setting of the games is a complete rippoff of Larry Niven's world building Ringworld novel combined with a heavy dose of Babylon 5. Still they were good games for their time, and their biggest innovation were FMVs which were very cool but kind of gimmicky as no one could afford live action hollywood actors who would star in interactive movies.

All Im saying is that there are so many developers who are asking for money out of OUR pocket to develop their games which MIGHT or MIGHT NOT ever see the light of day or might not end up even remotely close to what we were expecting of them, its crazy...

I wish Roberts the best of luck but I would still advise caution, he hasnt been making games for a while and I will save my money for a cancer cure crowdsource...(or something practical along those lines)